Mrs Ann Millican

Ode to Mrs. Millican

      I've been thinking the last 24 hours, what could I do to honor Mrs. Millican? What I decided on, to blog. Yep, write. Write about the person that taught me to write. 

My first memories of being in the Millican household are filled with a baby. I remember when they brought Brian home. I had a new life long friend. We played with the letters on the refrigerator. We fought like siblings and probably ate more worms and dirt together than anyone else on the street. We were snowcone eating, snowball throwing, bicycle riding fools.

I loved being over there so much that my first broken arm was acquired on their breezeway. I remember it being wet and down I went. I'm sure I got a pop ice out of the freezer there. My sister Teresa fell off a pool table there, if I remember that story accurately. (I'm sure Max or Mark pushed, right?) 

We had a certain rap on the door just as we opened it and walked right in. It didn't matter if someone said come in or not, we did. They knocked on the window as they came in at our house too. None of us locked our doors and we were always welcome at one another's home at any given time. 

Their house was amazing to me. They had air conditioning AND cable! I thought they were uptown. That was until our house caught fire when I was nine. My brother and I ran over at 3:30 in the morning, pounded on their door and there stands Mrs. Millican and Mr. Millican with a shotgun! They ushered us in and there I stood in a sleeveless night shirt freezing to death because of that air conditioning. True to form they were there for our family through thick and thin, plenty and want or celebrations and disasters. They were the best neighbors for a girl to ever ask.

I can still see Mr. Millican sitting in his chair looking over the top of his paper as I opened the sliding glass doors. He always had on his readers and smiled when I walked in. He took the time to put his paper down and talk to me. I believe they were truly interested in what was going on.

Mrs. Millican was always either in the kitchen or at her dining room table. She was on and off weight watchers. She would weigh her food and cook some of the oddest things I had ever seen. It may not have looked like beans and taters but it sure smelled good. That dining room table was not for dining. It was for grading papers. Many days I can recall "helping" grade papers and even entering them in to her grade book. Funny thing is, it wasn't allowed any longer when I started high school.

Our mothers had neighborhood watch before there was neighborhood watch. If either my mom or Mrs Millican's kitchen light wasn't on at the appropriate times, someone would get a phone call. They were each other's back up alarm. We knew if we heard "Brriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiyyyunnn" we had better hightail it home. That little woman could call us from three streets over and we would still hear her. While I would catch lightening bugs and make mud pies, those Millican boys would catch snakes and played with puppies.

It was so difficult to get used to not seeing that kitchen light after the Millican house burned. Although I was a young adult the neighborhood was never the same. Gone was that breezeway. Gone was the switch bush that we had to pull from for our spankings. Gone were the familiar sights, smells and sounds that were my childhood next door. 

How many remember going into the English department, taking a right and having a seat? The first thing you were instructed to do was open your folder and start writing. Writing! Writing what? It didn't matter, the instruction was to write. Write whatever was on your mind for the next 10 minutes. If you have never tried it you should. You would find out how truly hard it is. Well, maybe not for you, but in ten minutes I had seen 6 squirrels, thought of three boys and was already bored. It didn't matter if I wrote about squirrels and boys but to be bored....just write. Free flow writing she called it, the introduction on how to get your thoughts on to the paper. I really wonder sometimes if she knew what she was in for when she told me to 1. Think and 2. put it on paper. Had she forgotten I was the child who couldn't sit still, be quiet or hated to read? But, smarter than the teenagers before her she knew exactly the ones that needed that extra push and she lovingly, gently, quietly, pushed.

Five hundred word theme was one of many classes she taught as an educator for Whitfield County. I'm sure I had every one she ever taught during my high school career. When Mr. Millican passed away I told her that she was the original "cut and paste" person. Bill Gates or whomever invented the office program must have sat through her class and learned how NOT to write on the back of his notebook paper. I still have some of those crazy free flow notebooks.

Interestingly, you may notice that my rambling ALWAYS calls her Mrs. Millican. It didn't matter that she was "Aunt Ann", "Ann" or "Mama" to others she had to be "Mrs. Millican" to us. Mom has a deep respect for teachers that she has passed to her children and she had the forethought to know one day we would be sitting in class calling our teacher by name. Ann would not have gone over well sitting in five hundred word theme. 

Many years after school was over and I had become a mother myself she asked me to call her Ann. I couldn't. I've tried. Even as she was lying in the hospital bed and I leaned down to kiss her forehead my words were "Mrs. Millican, I have to go back to work, I love you." When you see it on paper it reads so cold to always have been known as MRS. anything, but for me, it was the highest respect I could have shown her. 

Before anyone asks, there is more than five hundred words here and yes I copied and pasted my paragraphs here because I was free flow writing!

Some things will never change!